Means of Suppressing Demonstrations

SHOCK

Lea, the officer, had stopped feeling her own body. She lay on top of an anti-sniper barricade, holding up a page from a newspaper, blocking the stars. She had to stretch out her arms to hold the wide page above her head.

“Oh,” she said.

“The Army didn’t do it,” Tomer said. He flicked his cigarette butt down onto the asphalt of Route 799. He was talking about Huda, the little Palestinian girl on the beach. The picture in the newspaper showed her screaming on red sand, amid the body parts of the seven people who had been her family.

“I know,” she said. “This is a manipulation.”

The world said that the Israeli Army had done it with artillery fire, but the Israeli Army knew that the family had been killed by a dormant shell that Palestinian militants had left by the sea. Lea looked at Tomer. The orange light of the road lamps lit him from behind, so that he could have been a demon. He was nineteen, two years younger than the officer.

“It’s just that I can’t feel my body all of a sudden,” she said.

“Again?”

Lea often told him that she couldn’t feel her body. That she could move it, but not feel it. That those were two separate things. He never questioned her; he pushed her. This was what she wanted.

Tomer took his weapon off his back and pressed her shoulders into the concrete. When their pants were pulled down, he pressed his hands on her neck, then her arms. He called her Lea during the day, because it was her name, and because she said he could. At night, when he pulled her hair so hard that her scalp buzzed, he called her Officer, because it was what she said he should call her then. When she looked to the side, she could see the warm glow that came from the homes of people in nearby villages.

She knew that her military service was approaching its end, but could not feel it. She could not imagine or remember any of the things she had wanted before she became a soldier, and struggled to find things she wanted for her civilian life ahead. She guessed that she must want a family, or to get into a good school, but she guessed this from the data around her. She did not feel the want herself. When she first began feeling this way, less than a year into her service, after the neck of one of the soldiers at her checkpoint was cut almost in half, she decided that the only reasonable thing she could truly want must exist inside the Army, so she applied to become an officer. She did not want to be a dumb checkpoint soldier anymore, the type whose neck could get cut almost in half. She wanted to be able to yell at soldiers who put their necks where they might get cut. She grew to accept that her service time would begin and end in the Transitions Unit, but figured that if she had to be at a checkpoint she might as well be an officer.

Tomer did almost everything that she asked of him. He was a sensible nineteen-year-old boy. And Lea, she had a certain beauty, after all. A cold, humming, unfazed beauty, and great breasts. She was also the only girl sprinkled into his days.

Lea woke up alone in her field bed the next morning. She had her own tent, because she was the only female at the checkpoint.

It was an odd posting. Route 799 cut through the West Bank, but had been closed to Palestinians since 2002, when the motorcyclists were shot. The Army needed four soldiers and a commanding officer to staff an improvised checkpoint every hundred kilometres or so, so she found herself commanding four boys who took shifts on an always deserted road. But if anyone did decide to show, even after all this time, there would be someone there to say, “Sorry, the road is blocked.” The posting would have made her angry, except she knew that her service would be over in a few weeks anyway.

She spent the day in bed, reading a prep book for university entrance exams. She hoped to score high enough to study business. She was supposed to check in with the boy on duty twice a shift, but she didn’t bother, because nothing ever happened. Except, that day, something did. Tomer, who had the afternoon shift, called her military cell to say that there were three Palestinian male demonstrators at the checkpoint.

“Have they thrown rocks or anything?” she asked.

“No, but they have a sign. And they keep on asking me to, like, disperse them, even though I explained that we don’t have any means of suppressing demonstrations here.”

“That’s not true.”

She was suddenly more excited than she had been since she was posted to Route 799. As an officer, she knew that every checkpoint had a supply box to be used in case of demonstrations. And, if the demonstrators insisted, she must aim to please.

She unlocked the metal supply closet in her tent and pulled out a wooden box. It was heavy, so it took her a while to carry it to the anti-sniper barricade, and then to cross the road to the sun umbrella that marked the checkpoint.

“We had a lesson about demonstrations and stuff in boot camp, but I forget,” Tomer said.

Two of the demonstrators were in their thirties, and one was just a boy, a boy with his fingers in his mouth. They had a piece of A4 paper on which they had written “Open 799” in English, with a marker. One of the men was wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. He raised his hand, and so she signalled him to step forward. When he was four steps away, she signalled him to halt.

“Officer, we are here to demonstrate against the restriction of our mobility, which is a collective punishment and against international law,” the demonstrator said, in solid, accented Hebrew.

She put one hand on her weapon and one in her pocket. “How come there are only three of you? This is hardly a demonstration.”

“I do apologize, Officer. We have a wedding this week in the village, and, you see, other people, they are not serious,” he said. He bowed a little when he spoke. “Is there any way you could disperse us just a little—enough for a press blast, or something?”

She had meant to be cruel, but the man was rather sweet. He looked more like a bank customer asking for an increase of his credit limit than like a demonstrator. It made her feel, a little, like this was the real world.

“We’ll see what we can do,” she said.

She sat on the asphalt and opened the wooden box. There were printed instructions tucked inside a sheer nylon sleeve. Tomer signalled the man to step back and wait, then he sat by her and they both read:

The purpose of Means of Suppressing Demonstrations is to suppress demonstrations. It is intended to intimidate, and at most injure, but the purpose is not to kill. One general guideline:

*Use from light to heavy: shock, tear gas, rubber. We must minimize damage when possible.

Grenade 30, the shock grenade, was designed to stun and scare by creating a loud noise. The instructions said that, if detonated within two metres of a person, the grenade could damage the eardrums and cause light injuries, so Lea told the demonstrators to step back a bit. They backed up, still facing the sun umbrella, and after a while the boy took his fingers out of his mouth and gave her a hesitant thumbs-up. She didn’t know quite how to respond, so she gave him a thumbs-up, too. Then she quickly put her hand back on her weapon.

The shock grenade was orange, and cone-shaped. It had a red stripe encircling it. She held it in her hand and then bent to the ground to lift a rock. She dropped it into Tomer’s hand.

“You’re the soldier,” she said. “And, besides, it’s been longer since I last learned about this stuff. Let’s practice.”

They pretended that the rock was a grenade. She gave him the instructions as if she knew them by heart. She reminded him to keep the grenade in the palm of his hand and to secure the lever with his index finger. She explained how to thread the middle finger of his left hand inside the safety, as if it were a ring, and to pull it with a spin of his wrist, as if he were checking his watch. She raised her voice at him a bit, because he pulled his arm back for the practice throw without keeping his eyes on it.

“The instructions say after you take the safety out you have to look at the grenade at all times, because you only have three and a half seconds until it explodes. What if you took your hand back and hit a wall?”

“But I know there’s no wall behind me,” he said.

“What if there were, suddenly? What if a bird came? It is not nice to have something explode in your hand, even a shock grenade.”

After a couple of dry runs, it was time for the real thing. The boy had his fingers in his mouth again, and one of the men was wiping his brow. Heat radiated from the asphalt between them.

“O.K.?” she shouted. Then she and Tomer put their earplugs in.

She thought that anything one could guard against with pieces of foam could not be so powerful, but each time a grenade exploded she felt the noise in her hip bones like a jolt and in her mouth like a hint of metal.

After four grenades, the demonstration was dispersed. Everything went according to plan, just as anyone who was standing in her position would have anticipated.

During her school years, she had felt as if every minute were part of a race. Get that grade. That boy. That shirt. The Army was a numbing respite from that eighteen-year-long breathless race. Whatever she did, the Army would end when it ended. She would arrive at the same spot, that same station near the base where soldiers return their uniforms at long last. Most of her days involved procedures and orders, going from one dot to the next in what appeared to be the only possible straight line.

She tried, a bit, still, sometimes, to jut out of the line, the way a drawn line jutted during her school years when her thumb on a ruler forced the pencil off course. She tried with sex, with pain, with shocking newspaper articles, sometimes, but she did not try too hard.

TEAR GAS

The story in the newspaper that Tomer brought to the barracks that night was about a girl who’d been killed by her mother. The girl was an Israeli Arab from a northern village, and she had got pregnant by her neighbor, who had raped her and was expected to receive a harsh sentence. A picture showed the girl on the day of her high-school graduation, smiling and wearing jeans. She had a generous, good-girl smile. She looked like the kind of schoolgirl you couldn’t even gossip with about soap-opera characters. The mother was expected to receive a light sentence, because she had acted in the name of honor, and out of passion, and one has to respect another’s culture. She had used knives and a cane and a plastic bag, and she swore that she had first urged the girl to take her own life.

The officer let the boys keep the newspaper that the delivery truck brought every morning, with the understanding that Tomer would save her the most shocking parts to read at night. She didn’t want to waste time reading anything that would make her feel less than what was most.

“I thought that little boy was going to cry,” Tomer said that night. He was wearing his undershirt and uniform pants, even though she had told him that she didn’t like it when he stepped out of the residential section not in full uniform.

“I didn’t,” she said. “It was just some noise. I didn’t even think it would disperse them, but maybe they just wanted something symbolic.” She could hear singing in a language not her own coming from a radio in a house nearby.

“It was, like, boom!” Tomer said. Then they didn’t talk anymore.

She hadn’t told him she couldn’t feel parts of her body that night, but on the concrete they acted as though she could not feel anything at all, and everything was fair and necessary as long as the other soldiers could not hear them. The tents where the other soldiers slept were only half a kilometre away from the anti-sniper barricade, and sometimes she screamed loud enough that she thought she should worry.

Her hours, the sands. She passed through them like a ghost she read about in a book she had bought at the supermarket as a teen-ager. The ghost was in a house, but could not open drawers, or pick up a coffee cup. She could not move a thing, and her existence did not matter, was not felt.

The demonstrators came back the next afternoon. She had spent the morning wondering if they would. She made mistakes on a practice test in her prep book, even on one math question that was little more than algebra and common sense.

The demonstrators came back, this time with earplugs.

She had told the early-morning-shift soldier to take the wooden supply box to the checkpoint, just in case.

“What is it we can do for you now?” she asked the man as he carefully approached. He was wearing the same T-shirt as the day before. The boy held the sign this time, but he still had his fingers in his mouth.

“The thing is, no one is going to write a story about a few noise crackers,” the man said. “That’s the thing, Officer.” He was cautious, like a customer who had bought a shirt and was now demanding a refund, even though he had already worn the shirt more than once. But he didn’t back down.

“The boy could get hurt,” she said. Tomer stood behind her, drumming on his collarbone with his fingernails.

He looked younger. She remembered that the instructions said that, no matter what, means of suppressing demonstrations should not be used against children. She also remembered a long discussion in her officers’ training school about a child being anyone whom you could not possibly imagine having already had his bar mitzvah, wearing a suit and reading at the temple and all that. These demonstrators really knew their stuff—informed consumers or whatnot.

“Rapunzel? Rapunzel moved out years ago. I’m Bruce, and I have a stack of old newspaper clippings I’d like to show you.”Buy the print »

The Federal, the gun used for shooting gas grenades, looked more like a toy gun than any actual toy gun she had ever seen. It had a wooden stock with two silver handles, one in front and one in back. It looked as if it had been spray-painted. The instructions for it were long, and she didn’t want the man to think that he had the power to make her move faster, so she shooed him away without a word of promise, and sat on the plastic chair under the sun umbrella to read.

For some reason, the instructions were half history. After a few minutes, she had learned that the Federal gun was invented in America, by a company called Federal, hence the name! In the Army, it seemed that each document was allowed to have its own life. Sometimes there were still surprises in the Army. Small times.

The Federal’s ammunition was a 37-mm. grenade filled with CS-type gas. It was silver with a blue stripe and looked very pretty and technological. The Federal had sights, and this worried her, because both she and Tomer were terrible marksmen, which was what had landed them on Route 799 in the first place. But the instructions said that the sights were not to be used—the shooter shouldn’t aim directly at an individual target, since gas disperses. When she put her hand to her nose, she could smell a bit of the gas already, cutting into her lungs like sawdust.

The instructions said that the gun’s effective range was eighty metres, but it didn’t say how close was too dangerous, and so she positioned the demonstrators at a distance that looked like about fifty metres, then thought better of it and told them to take a few steps back.

She licked her finger to check the direction of the wind, but couldn’t feel a thing. She loaded the gun, hoped for the best wind direction, and aimed at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground.

All this time, she had not said a word to Tomer and he had not said a word to her. But then she signalled him to take her place. She said, “Literally, all you have to do now is press the trigger, but press it hard, because the gun has no safety, so the designers compensated by giving it a stubborn trigger.”

Then she waved to the demonstrators, and even though Tomer had not counted, had not warned them, there was the slightest sound of a thing coming undone, and then the demonstrators’ faces were red and wet and screaming, and then they ran and were gone.

RUBBER

There were not enough stars that night, and on the barricade Lea was crying. The lights of the houses went out one after another. The picture in the newspaper that Tomer brought was of a bird whose species would be extinct in two years. The bird was an eagle with a gray tail, but the newspaper said it was called the white-tailed eagle, which made Lea think that the picture and the story could be lies. But the bird looked angry in its eyes in a way she had not known birds could be, even those that knew they were going extinct.

“This is the worst you could find today?” she asked.

“There was no mention of the demonstrators,” Tomer said. They had reported the incident to the Route 799 headquarters over the phone on the first day, but no one had seemed to care much about it.

Tomer was on his back, too, looking at the paper and then over at her. He crushed her shoulder with his. “You are crying, though,” he said. He had not seen her cry before. “Or is it the tear gas? You’re the one who told me to wash my hands twice before touching my face,” he said.

“I am not that stupid,” she said. “I am going to go to T.A.U. for accounting, you know.” She had never talked to him about when she would leave, and she didn’t know if he knew that it would be soon.

“Then what?”

“My shoulder. You’re hurting it.”

She had known they would come back the next morning, so she was able to study without being distracted. She made only four mistakes on the practice exam, all of them in the English section. She knew the answers were wrong before she checked, but could not guess what the right ones would be.

She had known that the demonstrators would come back and so she went with Tomer for the start of his shift. What she had not known was that the demonstrators would come with lab goggles and surgical masks. She could not use gas against them. They looked like mad scientists and she wondered where they had got those costumes, in their pathetic town in the West Bank and all. The boy wore cheap plastic sunglasses over his goggles, and she smiled when she saw them, so he smiled back.

But when the man with the Guns N’ Roses T-shirt shouted, “It’s rubber day!,” her face hardened. She used only her chin to signal him. She let him come closer than she had before.

“No,” she said. “A rubber bullet could kill you guys. This has gone on long enough.”

“But, but—” the man said. He thought better of the tone of his voice. He realized that he was not a customer, that he had every reason to be afraid of upsetting her. “That’s the point, though. They’ll report rubber for sure. They always report rubber.”

Lea shook her head.

“We won’t ask for anything ever again, we swear.”

She didn’t move.

“We just want this one thing, and you can give it to us. I mean—” he said. “Think about that.”

She thought about that, and she knew that she was done for, and that her face showed it. The man stepped away on his own, raising his arms slightly to signify that he was giving her all the time in the world.

“The boy has to move away, because you have to be eighteen for rubber,” she said. She wasn’t sure if that was a rule but thought that it might be.

The boy sat with his fingers in his mouth by the side of the road for a half hour, until they wrinkled. That’s how long it took her to read the instructions. Longer. Tomer was standing above her as she read.

The instructions warned that rubber bullets could kill. Everything about them seemed designed to entertain and to complicate a soldier’s life. It occurred to her to wonder how many soldiers had read these instructions recently.

The Romay was a metal barrel that you screwed onto an unloaded rifle. Then you stuffed four rubber-covered steel bullets down it, and blasted them out with a single demi-bullet you loaded in your magazine. If you used fewer than four rubber bullets at a time, the demi-bullet would expel too forcefully, and the effect would be like that of live fire. The bullets spread at ten-degree angles, and you had to make sure that you hit only the target’s legs, because if you hit other parts of the body the effect would be like that of live fire. If the target was farther than fifty metres, then it was out of range. If it was closer than thirty metres, then the rubber bullets would have the effect of live fire.

The instructions were written so that if the rubber bullets killed someone the blame would rest on the finger that had pressed the trigger. She wondered how this would work in most cases, when the demonstrators were not three coöperative individuals with a paper sign but an actual angry mob. But she did not wonder too much, because her demonstrators were three coöperative individuals, so what she did next was to measure.

She told them to go very far, and then walked toward them, counting her steps, as she had learned in boot camp. According to her calculations, they were a little less than fifty metres away from the sun umbrella. She signalled for them to take a few steps forward, and then walked back to Tomer.

The two men stood quietly, like tame children waiting for permission to go play in the park, positioned in the exact spot where she had told them to wait to be shot.

The kit had only a few demi-bullets, so she put two inside Tomer’s magazine. The bullets were the same as regular bullets except they had no copper bullet heads.

“Below the knees,” she told Tomer. “Get on the ground and aim below the knees.”

It was the other man, the one she had never talked with, who took the hit. He lay on the ground and held his leg like a soccer player who had sustained an injury. But an hour later he limped away. His limping looked bad, because he was supported by the one man on his left, and by the boy, who was small, on his right.

LIVE FIRE

Live fire is not a means of suppressing demonstrations, and Lea knew that the coöperative demonstrators knew this—they knew all the rules—and so she knew that they would not come back.

That night, out of laziness, Tomer brought the entire newspaper to her, and then he was so rough that she spent moments on the concrete imagining her spine as a string, and then that it had knotted, and then that it had snapped.

But they did come back. The two men came back with bits of mattresses tied to their legs with pieces of cloth. They looked as if they were half sumo wrestlers. The men came immune to rubber bullets. And the boy with wet fingers came back simply as a boy.

“We won’t shoot you with live fire,” she said. That was the only option left.

“Please,” the man said. He stepped closer, without invitation, and so did the boy and the other man. “Shoot and miss, just shoot and miss.”

“You have to have means and intent to kill for us to shoot,” she said. “That’s I.D.F. Guidebook 101.”

“Please,” the man said. “We need to be in the newspaper. Page 5, even.”

But she said means. Then she said intent. Then she said means.

“Means?” the boy asked.

“A gun,” Tomer said.

“Or a knife,” she said.

“Or a rock,” Tomer said.

He didn’t know what he was saying, because, at that, the boy slowly bent to pick up a rock from the asphalt. It was the rock that Tomer had used to practice throwing a shock grenade.

She raised her gun to her shoulder and charged the weapon and aimed at the boy. Tomer raised his gun to his shoulder and charged the weapon and aimed at the boy.

It was before the boy heard the man whisper in Arabic that he dropped the rock to the ground, as if he had been caught shoplifting it.

Then the boy put his fingers in his mouth, and the guns were lowered, and she thought the day and the summer and the place were almost over, but Tomer spoke up behind her.

“Please?” the boy said. He wasn’t asking her. He was asking the man. The arrest of a child was always at least page 5, she knew. He’d be out in days; he’d probably be out in days.

The man shook his head but then the boy said that the thing was, they just wanted this one thing, and now they could give it to themselves, and then he told the man to think about that and the man knew that he was done for.

“Whore,” the man said to Lea as Tomer took the boy by the arm. It was what he needed to say to her. After all, she was a female checkpoint officer. He played the role of the poor Palestinian, but it felt forced and she was embarrassed for him.

After the men left, she and Tomer walked behind the boy toward the base to make the calls about the arrest. Night was falling by the time they walked back to the barricade, but the orange road lights were not yet on.

She sped up, because she wanted to walk alongside the boy. She quickened her step, but then grew afraid that she had startled him. Her hand jumped and grazed his.

Instead, it was she who was afraid, and more, because she could feel the drying wetness of his hand now on her hand, and bits of dust from the rock he had held, and the wind. She could feel it all at once. She thought of how, later that night, Tomer would slam the entirety of his weight onto her bones, pressing them into the concrete. For a passing moment, she wondered if he would call out her real name, rather than Officer. She wondered if she should ask him to, then remembered that it was not an important detail to ponder. Those dates, the dates at both ends of her service. Whatever happened between them was decoration and air and would not change the place where she would end up.

A few years later, they opened Route 799 again, but it lasted only a couple of months. There are still soldiers who spend three years doing little but saying, “Sorry, road is blocked,” to anyone stupid enough to approach. When she heard that the route was open, and then when she heard it had closed again, she could feel it: her own hand, the boy’s spit, almost as much as she had felt it then and there.

Sometimes, at dark parties in Tel Aviv and on walks and in rooms, she felt the spit on her hand, even when she was not forced to hear about Route 799. She felt it at dark parties and on walks and in rooms where she was never alone, where she was always with someone, and it was when those people called her name that she felt it. What do you say, Lea? Thanks a lot, Lea. I agree with you, Lea. Every time she heard her name in the dark, she felt the boy’s spit on her hand.

That night, Tomer trailed only one step behind her and the boy. They walked, kicking stones, humming, staring at the stars before the lights took some of them. She thought about all that had yet to happen, but that would happen soon. The concrete. The paper. The plea for shock.

“Lea,” Tomer said, right before they reached the base. “Let’s remember to take bets on which page in the news this arrest will be. What do you say, Lea?”

And there was that silly question again, the one she had just chased. It came back. She wondered what he would call her that night, though she knew that whatever word of the words of this world he chose would not matter. It would not shift the pace of the steps of the days, or even the pace of the steps of that night.

As they walked, the boy put his hand in his mouth again, the hand that hers had just grazed.

That night, Lea was twenty-one. Tomer, nineteen; the boy, thirteen. They passed by the concrete barricade in silence and with synchronized steps. Through the eyes of a villager looking out from the light of a very distant house, they could have been a family. ♦